Further Down the Road

Further Down the Road

Every trip eventually

takes me back to that one, its

eternal highway unrolling

a black and white flash through the smoky night.

Your yellow eyes shone a light down the center

as every few minutes you told me,

“Just a little further to go.”

No forgetting that road trip

in a borrowed black bus with the band in the back,

late and frantic, over the speed limit,

your hands hot on mine and the wheel

when with eyes shut or open

we saw more than we wanted. 

Always a little further to go,

a turnoff missed, a half-empty tank

always a little harder to stop,

ask directions since it was only

 a little further to go.

Through the windshield
that swollen moon rose, turned alien sun

poppy red in the smoke blackened night,

shining its sick ruby light,

hanging in the smog over Gary,

dreaming us on

a little further and gone.

Last night in my bed, the one

that became the destination,

 I saw that husk of moon again

without windshield or window, closed  my eyes

on the castle'd smokestacks shooting fire

through the restless wall.

So many trips since then

so many other hands on me and the wheel.

Yellow desert days, white nights,

mountains like songs, forests of rain,

green gardens blowing bantam sequins of life;

but that bloody moon's a bright brooding still, 

a celestial fixture that hangs itself scarlet 

in every sky. And I

have

just a little

further to go.

December, 2010

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry


Based on a fragment from 1973
Image: photo by  Andreas Feininger,  1906-1999

Off the Shelf Archive - December #1

November's final Off the Shelf poem, Farewell to Florida,  by the American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is now being archived to make room for a selection from the immortal Christina Rossetti. Rossetti was a prolific poet who began writing at the age of 7, and produced a great many exceptional poems, but I'm afraid I'm once again indulging myself by posting my favorite of all her works, Echo, as the next Off the Shelf selection. Please feel free to comment on either poem here, as comments are disabled on all the other pages. Also, suggestions are always welcome for the next selection, so don't hesitate to recommend a poet you'd like to see represented. More information on what Off the Shelf is all about is posted on the Missionary Statement page.


Christina Rossetti was suggested by friend of the blog and excellent poet herself, Fireblossom, who grows poetry at Shay's Word Garden. Thanks, Shay.

Farewell to Florida

 I

Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,

The snake has left its skin upon the floor.

Key West sank downward under massive clouds

And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon

Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.

Her mind will never speak to me again.

I am free. High above the mast the moon

Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain

Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon

The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back

II

Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot

As if I lived in ashen ground, as if

The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound

From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,

Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,

Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,

Her days, her oceanic nights, calling

For music, for whisperings from the reefs.

How content I shall be in the North to which I sail

And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand ...

III

I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools

Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness

Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms

Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,

The trees like bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.

To stand here on the deck in the dark and say

Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone

And that she will not follow in any word

Or look, nor ever again in thought, except

That I loved her once ... Farewell. Go on, high ship.

IV

My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime

Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.

The men are moving as the water moves,

This darkened water cloven by sullen swells

Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,

The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.

To be free again, to return to the violent mind

That is their mind, these men, and that will bind

Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me

To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.

Wallace Stevens  

Photo posted by czarina369cz  courtesy of Google Image search, originating website.

Friday Flash 55 ~ The Nightly News Zombie

The Nightly News Zombie

The newslady’s tucked her face again,

Done some debriding and chemical peel

Slipped a stitch into her eye-holes,

Shot some more autologen into

Her already full pouting lips,

Ruffled up her hair of unknown color

In another new way.

I’ve watched every night

For over ten years.

She never gets older,

She just gets 

Undead-er.

December 2010

Posted for Friday Flash 55 at G-man's.

I have a lot more of this poem, but it's going to have to be put on the slab in my moldering basement laboratory for more experimentation before I resurrect it to hideous Undead life. Til then, here's 55 words of it.

Monkey Man points out there's a Blogger Zombie Walk happening today on the intertubes. For additional zombie fare, be sure to check out Ghost Hunting Theories. 

Photo still from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, courtesy google image search

Sledding with Cats

Sledding with Cats

Circling in white whirling sand,

old eyes blinded by the summer,

and numb feet in hard shoes

cannot tell it’s snow.

A car drives by on a silent street,

ghost at the wheel

singing a thirty year old song

thinking it’s still

alive.

The house, it’s empty, still.

Against the wall, a sled rusts,

propped by children’s hands

against a snowy day

long gone,

too many calculators and keyboards ago.

Still, in the granite sky

ten clouds make a wall

where the sun guards his back

and holds as best he can that high ground

against an empire of Cold

knowing what he loses one day

on another he'll win.

A child gets out

another sled, and finds another

hill, another child, another winter,

leaning against the door

and cries out loud the news

so even ghosts can hear.

And a dog that knows no better

drags her woman relentlessly

through cold frozen drizzle in

an infinite orgy of

evergreen canine spring.

Inside warm windows

cats are laughing.

Fall and Winter, 2010*

Posted for    MeetingtheBar:Martian Style   at dVerse Poets Pub

Originally posted for Magpie Tales, #44

*For those who may think some of the lines are familiar, this poem is composed in part of recycled and expanded bits and pieces of micropoetry and twitter haiku written over the course of the last few months.

Milkweed

Milkweed

Late at night awake, sometimes

I wish that with me here I still had you

to stare at the invisiblest rhymes.

I know my dear that if I told you

my mailbox was on some fine days

a folded gnome bent over, painted blue,

or that I saw a fuchsia bird ablaze

hanging beakside down you'd know it wasn't

from the wooden feeder’s trays,

or that music just mustn’t

want to play inside the half

where the bottle wasn’t,

I know you’d let me laugh

I know you’d understand

all these things, this riff and raff.

I know you’d tell me, ever bland

your soup was cubed and smile around

the thorny rose in your mouth’s hand.

You’d draw fishes flaunting pistols, dancing drowned

in salty spotlights, playing out piscine charades

you’d let me cry and let me laugh till I hit ground.

But you’re gone, my dear, in spades

all of you each particle and seed

your face, your cashmere voice, angora braids

your hands and heart and all controls

chestnut hair and snowy bones, afloat like milkweed,

blown in the great diaspora of souls.

Leaving me to let this screed

fly into the gnome’s mouth, freed.

December 2010

For Marsha Rae

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

This poem is written roughly in the terza rima form.

Photo of milkweed by Lisa Spangler  

under Creative Commons License 3.0 U.S.

Microfiction Monday # 60--A Grave Matter

Two boys tip old tombstones,

Spray graffiti in the graveyard,

Jump on
Two graves.

Rotted pine coffins collapse.
Now they hold four 

Not two.

Nothing like a little gruesomeness to get that Holiday Feeling going. Thanks to the G-Man and friends for getting me to play this game over at Stony River

River

River

Deserted words

empty-tongued wind

calling ghosts up out of graves of unquiet days…

voices in the air…

Kissing under the piano drinking wine,

pull me closer with hands of roses,

with Arab pictures brown inside your eyes…

Sand and horses, incense,

      

   Dry licking wind…

Another desert

Crossed by water.

March 1974

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

Photo by Lisa Michelle Arhontidis.

December Villanelle

December Villanelle

December the snowy white hope firepit.

December the cold-burning brand.

December when ghosts all come back to sit

In stores, streets and houses lit bright or unlit

all along the sharp iceslipping strand.

December the snowy white hope firepit.

December the voice too cold to commit

yelling its annual endless demand. 

December when ghosts all come back to sit

beside us around us. They flurry and hit.                               

What they wield has no need for corporeal hand. 

December the snowy white hope firepit.

Holes leak in facades drilled by memory’s sharp bit.

Green tree drips red drops in a bucket of sand. 

December when ghosts all come back to sit.

Pull off the holly and break up each bit.          

Build a new fire that flares on command

in December’s dead dreary white hope firepit

and burn all the chairs where the ghosts come to sit.

December 2010

 /ˌvɪləˈnɛl/ Show Spelledvillanelle: Show IPA

a short poem of fixed form, written in tercets, usually five in number, followed by a final quatrain, all being based on two rhymes. Origin:1580–90.

~ dictionary.com

Photo by M. Krell, courtesy google image search, source link